Enass Khansa

I joined AUB´s Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages as an Assistant Professor in January 2018. I got my Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Georgetown University (2015), held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Art and Architecture, Harvard University (2016-2017), and The Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University´s Real Colegio Complutense (2015-2016).

I am interested in readership, broadly conceived, as a lens to interact with Arabo-Islamic medieval culture. My work is guided by a twined focus: looking into how communities in the medieval world construct notions of legitimacy as frameworks for their worldview; and, equally, into the politics through which we, as readers today, perceive and examine these histories.

In my teaching, I invite an examination of the interplay between the material and the literary; knowledge production and political rhetoric; kingship and the arts; local and broader cultures, and Islamic intercultural exchanges with European cultures.  

With AGYA members, I hope to forge collaborative projects across disciplines, around these questions, to explore new ways of understanding and shaping our cultures.